(The Economic Collapse Blog)—Not him again. We all remember what happened the last time around, and now Bill Gates is warning of another major crisis that he wants to help fix. Personally, the thought of putting Bill Gates in charge of anything important makes me queasy. I wouldn’t even hire him to mop the floors of a Dairy Queen. But even after all of the revelations about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, there are a lot of people out there that still trust him, and the big networks keep putting him on television.
Now he is positioning himself as the savior of the AI industry, and that should deeply alarm all of us.
Fox News is reporting that Bill Gates is strongly considering using his vast personal fortune to create an “AI safety framework” in order to “help steer the technology in a better direction”…
Microsoft founder Bill Gates may take a more active role in AI safety by raising the issue more openly with business leaders and potentially using his own wealth to help steer the technology in a better direction, Axios reported Thursday.
Gates has already spoken extensively about creating an AI safety framework with leading AI executives, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, the outlet reported.
People familiar with Gates’ thinking say he believes restraining AI may be one of his most important contributions to society.
“Restraining AI” is another way of saying that he wants to control AI.
If I was choosing a candidate for the worst possible person on the entire planet to put in control of the AI industry, Bill Gates would definitely be on the short list.
But he is openly lobbying to be the guy.
On Sunday, he told CNN that AI is “the most dangerous technology humans ever invented” and he ominously warned that “we are going to have a lot of negative surprises” during the year ahead…
Bill Gates returned to the Sunday-show circuit this week with a fresh round of alarms about artificial intelligence, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper that the technology is “more dangerous than any” cars, planes, or drugs and that “grim possibilities” await if society fails to maintain control.
Speaking on State of the Union, the Microsoft co-founder and described AI as “the most dangerous technology humans ever invented.” He predicted that “over the next year, primarily in the cyber area, we are going to have a lot of negative surprises” once “bad people” strip safeguards from the latest models.
The real near-term danger, he said, is not AI “getting out of control”—that remains “years away”—but criminals using the tools for extortion, stock-market disruption, or similar schemes that already have proven business models.
This reminds me so much of past warnings that Gates has issued.
Does he know something that the rest of us do not?
Interestingly, Axios recently reported that our largest AI companies are actively planning for a “day after” event.
Apparently some industry insiders expect something big to happen within the next 6 to 12 months…
Nothing to worry about over here, just the fact that the people building AI are preparing for it to go badly wrong, very soon. Axios reports that top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies are privately planning for a public and political backlash after a catastrophic AI event. Many insiders expect this to happen within six to 12 months, most likely as a cyberattack that knocks out financial services, internet access or even power and water.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei raised the alarm last month, warning that a swarm of AI agents could take over the internet, “potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.”
Is it just a coincidence that they are talking about a one year timeframe and Bill Gates is also talking about a one year timeframe?
Something doesn’t smell right about all of this.
But without a doubt, the threat of AI cyberattacks is very real. At this stage, Internet security firms are really struggling to stay ahead of the game…
An arms race is accelerating. Cyber-security firms and others are trying to safeguard the machinery of the global financial system – while, on the other side, rogue states such as North Korea and Iran are hell-bent on causing chaos and division and stealing anything they can get their hands on.
As the IMF warns, the world’s ability to combat such threats is becoming ever more difficult because of the near-instantaneous nature of attacks enabled by AI. In more than 70 per cent of reported cyber-attacks so far in 2026, the providers of the software designed to repel them were unable to update their systems before the inadequacies were exploited by hostile forces.
Could you imagine the panic that would occur if an AI cyberattack took down a major bank?
Even worse, could you imagine the panic that would occur if an AI cyberattack took down the stock market?
We are far more vulnerable than most people realize.
And this is just the beginning, because AI technology continues to improve at an exponential rate.
Anthropic is warning that we could be just “months away” from ultra-intelligent self-replicating AI models that are able to send countless copies of themselves to devices connected to the Internet all over the world…
Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off—though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own. In our evaluations, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested.
Models of 30B parameters and under can already complete many of the individual steps for replication today, though they make mistakes when composing them end to end. In our simplified evaluations, GLM-5.2 and stronger models are capable of end to end replication. If small models improve at their historical rate, they’ll match this capability level by the end of this year. Small weight-based replicators may be possible soon after.
This is a scenario that I have been warning my readers about for a long time.
Daniel Freeman was one of the authors of the Anthropic article, and he is warning that we have now entered the realm of science fiction…
What these researchers are creating could soon escape our control.
And that would be really bad.
But for now most of those that are working in the AI industry still believe that the benefits will greatly outweigh the costs.
In fact, some researchers have actually started smoking because they are so convinced that AI will ultimately cure cancer…
Forget sleepmaxxing and cold plunging: smoking is the new lifestyle flex among AI researchers.
At least, that’s according to Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, who said some AI researchers are taking up smoking to signal their belief that AI will eventually cure cancer.
“So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI,” Sankar said in an interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
Isn’t that nuts?
Sadly, our entire world is going crazy at this point.
And it would be really crazy for the AI industry to hand the keys over to Bill Gates.
Putting Bill Gates in charge of AI security would be kind of like putting a fox in charge of the henhouse.
Please.
Don’t do it.
But they aren’t going to listen to people like us, are they?
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
